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For months, I’d been fiddling around with an outline for a near-future sci-fi novel. I had all kinds of ideas about how things might go if I were writing for fun rather than work, after months of meditative, screen-free activities. Things did not go that way. Instead, I spent long hours attached to a screen, distracted and diffuse, producing little but feeling obligated to remain there until I coughed up enough to justify my miserable existence—in short, right back where I was before my break. I threw up my hands that night, actually slammed them on the keyboard and startled Forest from his sleep. It wasn’t the challenge of creative writing that stymied me so much as the blasted computer. Every time I ventured back into its orbit, I confronted a minefield of deeply ingrained habits. My old routines—clear inbox of new e-mail, check RSS feeds, read TV-show recaps, update apps, check e-mail again—were under way before I knew it. The slightest cues triggered them, even the physical act of resting my hands on the keyboard. My budding mindfulness was proving inadequate in the circumstance I most needed it. It was dispiriting, but it also raised a question: Just how mindful should you have to be to get anything done these days? Must every professional be bodhisattva? One striking feature of the digital-self-help literature is that it treats distraction, overload, and frazzlement almost entirely as personal challenges. If you’re stressed out and unable to concentrate, you’re not enlightened enough. Meditate harder. The problem with this approach is that it sidesteps what sociologists call political economy, the larger social and economic forces at work in our lives. As author, activist, and documentary filmmaker Astra Taylor argues in her rousing new book, The People’s Platform, discourse about online technologies almost always elides “the thorny issue of the larger social structures in which we and our technologies are embedded.” Because most Web services are “free”—that is, supported by advertising—their very survival depends on distracting and bewitching their users. Silicon Valley software engineers design apps that way on purpose; they’re quite clever at it. Because America’s culture of professional overwork and exhaustion is unrestrained by workplace regulations or conventions governing e-mail, unceasing connectivity has become an unspoken job requirement. Because social groups coalesce and plan online, even brief screenless periods breed FOMO, the fear of missing out. There’s only so much any individual can do in the face of these forces. Mindfulness may be a necessary form of self-care, even self-defense, but it is not a solution to digital unease any more than driving a Prius is a solution to climate change. Instead of just treating our anxieties exclusively as a symptom of poorly engineered minds in need of hacking, perhaps we also ought to see them as a collective challenge, to be addressed through social and political action. Hey, we could start a hashtag. ---- Still, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go to work in the culture you have, not the culture you might want. One has to get on with things, and Internet David Roberts has to go back to work soon. Like a shuttle nearing a planet’s gravitational field, I’m preparing for reentry. That means implementing survival strategies. Some I’ve been working on all year; others will go into effect only when I return to Grist. Seventy-two percent of Americans check e-mail from home or while on vacation. Photo: Grant Cornett First, I’m holding on to the three most centering, mind-calming practices I developed during the break. There’s yoga, of course, which I can no longer imagine doing without. There’s walking. And there’s bass guitar, my delight in which is undiminished by lack of skill. (If I accomplished nothing else this year, at least I learned the Game of Thrones theme on bass.) For at least one or two hours every workday, I’m going to use an app called Freedom to cut off my Internet connection entirely. That will be my time for deep focus. Come hell or high water, I will take regular, scheduled breaks from screens: 15 minutes of nonscreen activity for every two hours at the computer. I’ll take a short walk, play with Forest, get coffee with a friend, or just sit and look out the window. (I’m telling you, it’s underrated.) That’s about an hour of mental recharging per eight-hour workday—not perfect, but a big improvement. I don’t plan to swear off social media. Unlike some disconnectionists, I don’t view online relationships as toxic or inauthentic. I benefit from them enormously. But I do want to keep that ping time corralled, so it doesn’t smear into everything else. That means turning off all push notifications and checking e-mail and social media only when I’ve decided to, not when they buzz at me. The ideal cycle, in my hopeful imagination, is a period of singular concentration, followed by a limited period of pinging, followed by a period of rest, exercise, or social interaction, away from screens. Four or five of those cycles add up to a productive day, with rhythm and variety. When I’m writing, I want to write with full focus. When I’m pinging, I want to ping without angst or guilt. When I’m with my family, I want to be with my family, not half in my phone. It is the challenge of our age, in work and in life: to do one thing at a time, what one has consciously chosen to do and only that, and to do it with care and attention. I hope I’m up to it. That any of us are. ---- Last summer, Huck decided he wanted to get serious about baseball. Since then we’ve worn patches on either side of the backyard, tossing the ball after school. He improved enough that he tried out in the fall and moved up to Little League a year early. Late in the season, his coaches discovered that he could pitch, and he went on to save a few post-season play-off nail-biters. A couple of weeks ago, he and I were throwing again out back. That hesitant, clumsy kid from last summer is gone. Now he likes to tug his cap and spit in the dirt and make it look easy. We’d settled in, and neither of us had spoken for a while. Sun dappled the grass, the air was scented with lilac, and the ball hit our gloves with reassuring thumps. I looked at Huck then, aglow in the late-afternoon light, and I felt an upwelling of sadness, so sudden and overwhelming my eyes blurred with tears. I saw with unforgiving clarity that the moment would pass; it was already passing, even as I contemplated it. Life slides by from the present to the past so fast it sometimes seems we barely get a glimpse, barely get to register anything before we’re gone. Yet death is coming for all of us. Even me. Even Huck. And then, just as quickly, a sense of joy and profound relief. I hadn’t missed it. However ephemeral the moment was, I was there, in it, fully present for it. The breeze was cool on my skin, I had nowhere else to be, and Huck was winding up.